Clyde P. Kruskal (born May 25, 1954) is an American computer scientist, working on parallel computing architectures, models, and algorithms. As part of the ultracomputer project, he was one of the inventors of the read–modify–write concept in parallel and distributed computing. He is an associate professor of computer science at the University of Maryland, College Park.

Early life, education, and career

Kruskal is the son of mathematician Martin Kruskal. He graduated from Brandeis University in 1976, and went to the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences at New York University for graduate study, earning a master's degree in 1978 and completing his Ph.D. in 1981. His dissertation, Upper and Lower Bounds on the Performance of Parallel Algorithms, was supervised by Jack Schwartz. He became an assistant professor of computer science at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign before moving to Maryland.

Selected publications

With William Gasarch, Kruskal is the author of the book Problems With A Point: Exploring Math And Computer Science (World Scientific, 2019). He has many highly-cited research publications, including: